I'm surprised JGC was assumed to be gay for standing up for Alan Turing, but proud that he handled the assumptions well. From our perspective, Turing's story is so much bigger than his sexuality. But to the common person, who likely knows little to nothing about Turing beyond what the news says - that he was convicted of homosexuality by his country - this advocacy appears to be one for gay people.

Thank you, Mr. Graham-Cumming, not just for standing up for Turing, but for simply explaining you are not gay without getting defensive. Too often, straight men handle being assumed as gay as a terrible and dehumanizing accusation.

That said, I think that JGC breaks from this in the essay. He says:

as a geek I empathized with the idea that being different from some societal norm brings enormous pain.

To me, that destroys, at least partially, the idea of a completely independent bystander fighting for truth. It brings us, at least partly, back to someone campaigning for a fellow in his own group -- it's just that the dimension JGC chose to sort by is different from the one that most of society would choose.

I wish John had simply said because Alan Turing’s treatment was wrong and left it at that.

Turing had considered suicide before, during his failed work on the Riemann hypothesis. At that time, he schemed up a suicide mechanism involving an apple and electrical wiring which he described in a letter to an old boyfriend.

Turing was pretty eccentric, romanticized suicide (and was a little obsessed with this apple idea), and was in and out of depression.

Mind you, I agree. I'm just not so sure Turing ever would have died naturally.

I'm quite a believer in "if he hadn't done it, someone else would have" personally. I don't mean to belittle anyones contribution, but the idea that there's only one genius who can come up with something seems very unlikely to me.

Most inventions are 'discovered' by many people at around the same time.

Lets turn it around then. If he hadn't been gay, would he have been murdered?

> Most inventions are 'discovered' by many people at around the same time.

Yeah, this is true. Even revolutionary ideas seem to show up at multiple places at the same time. So it seems that the state of knowledge at the time of invention matters a great deal.

He committed suicide.

The legal term would be something like "proper application of criminal law". You can't claim that it was constructive manslaughter to apply the law at the time.

If they are not willful then I'm unmoved on my stance.

He also appeared to be an ephebophile. I have a hypothesis that his sexual liaisons with teenagers were an attempt to recapture his relationship with his (sole and very close) friend that died when he was at boarding school.

I have never encountered a rational argument for homophobia. Gay people seem to me to be just as likely to be virtuous or decadent as straight people.

Discriminating against people for having a different sexual orientation seems totally irrational to me. As far as I'm concerned, 'gay rights' generally equate to 'human rights' and you can sign me up for supporting those any day.

Gay: Suppose the "gay germ theory"[1] is correct. To allow vaccination/prophylaxis or not?

Labor: Freedom to legally organise is to me utterly unobjectionable, but I remember picking up a book on trade unionism in the library once and being completely unable to grasp the sense behind one of the articles in which the authors took it as given that striking should not even in theory be grounds for firing. Striking is part of a negotiation, it's a tool in the dance of "How shall we divide the money that is earned as a result of my employment between empolyer and employee?"

Where is the "right" place between freedom to organise + at-will employment, and a system like France, where unions "represent" workers in their economic sector who aren't members and get legally binding regulations, or like Germany's, where union representatives are always on the board, with voting positions?

Women's: Women make less than men on average. They also make very different choices of what jobs to work in, how many hours to work, and they are much more likely to have interruptions in their career. Given the second, is the first unjust, especially if the difference when you compare like with like is small?

Black's: Affirmative action here

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathogenic_theory_of_homosexual...

The problem is not that women make less than men on average, they often make less than men when doing the exact same job, for the exact same hours.

and they are much more likely to have interruptions in their career.

Did you read the thread about job hoppers, where many men said that job hopping was a good thing because it was in their best interest?

Could you share any citations?

Thus far, when trying to research this issue, keep running into the well-debunked The 76 cents (or 72 cents or X cents) on the dollar myth that still enjoys popularity amongst feminists.

Unfortunately, that statistic simply compares the earnings of full-time workers with the same job category. It ignores the hours of work per week, experience, danger, and a host of other factors. It quite literally compares the salary of people with years of experience who are working 60 hours a week directly with new hires of the same job title who are working 40 hours a week. It lumps them all together.

Study after study I've seen which have actually controlled for factors such as experience, hours worked, travel required, etc have found very little pay disparity. This NCPA article is a brief explanation of The Wage Gap Myth:

http://www.ncpa.org/pub/ba392 http://www.iwf.org/campus/show/18948.html

The Cato institute and others have done more in depth analysis.

Unless I'm horribly misreading the study, the claim a figure around 80 cents on the dollar after controlling for external factors, including hours worked, experience, and occupation. It's a lot worse before that.

In conclusion, while we were able to account for much of the difference in earnings between men and women, we were not able to explain the remaining earnings difference. It is difficult to evaluate this remaining portion without a full understanding of what contributes to this difference. Specifically, an earnings difference that results from individuals’ decisions about how to manage work and family responsibilities may not necessarily indicate a problem unless these decisions are not freely made. On the other hand, an earnings difference may result from discrimination in the workplace or subtler discrimination about what types of career or job choices women can make. Nonetheless, it is difficult, and in some cases, may be impossible, to precisely measure and quantify individual decisions and possible discrimination. Because these factors are not readily measurable, interpreting any remaining earnings difference is problematic.

This was a meta study that looked at data up to the mid-90s. Essentially the conclusion was that not everything can be explained through simply dividing by hours worked, but there are a variety of possible explanations including both discrimination, career choice and work/family balance.

Essentially the conclusion was that not everything can be explained through simply dividing by hours worked,

Which is exactly what you'd expect if there were a pay gap.

but there are a variety of possible explanations including both discrimination, career choice and work/family balance.

Fair enough, there are multiple causes. But if you look at the factors they account for (and which therefore fail to explain the missing 20 cents on the dollar, see pages 2 and 9), many of them are closely tied to work/family balance and career choices: experience, occupation, marital status, hours worked per year, etc. Few, if any, are proxies for discrimination or other social phenomena out of any particular woman's immediate control.

I am really suspicious of this, because it simply doesn't match my own experience. I've worked behind a bar, I've been a lifeguard, I've done a few jobs in hi-tech and equality is the norm.

Here in the UK the Office of National Statistics ripped apart Harriet Harman's figures on unequal pay... Turned out to get the political outcome she wanted, she was comparing the pay of female part-time workers to that of male full-time workers.

Incidentally, 80% of those working more than 50 hrs/week are male, and 98% of those killed at work are male.

Dutch research indicated that a big part of the 20% difference is because of the choices women make (though of course, it is still open for debate whether those choices are always true choices), but even accounting for that there was still a 7% difference that couldn't be explained (of course they also accounted for hours worked). This is a Dutch page with lots of info http://www.loonwijzer.nl/home/vrouwenloonwijzer/beloningsver...

It does say that the Netherlands is a bit worse than other European countries.

Also: I think some technical explanatins as to why it is "logical" that women earn less are nonsense. It makes no sense to penalize a women because she had two babies six and four years ago and therefore was out of the workplace for a few months if there is no objective difference in quality of work today.

I don't think danger has anything to do with pay. If it did, firefighters would earn a lot more than IT consultants. I also don't think responsibility has anything to do with it. If it did daycare workers would earn a lot more than programmers.

And I have never met a regular employee who honestly worked more than 50/hrs a week (in one job). In every case they could have done the work in 40 hours but they slacked off during the day (because nobody can stay focused for 10 hours a day every day). I had a parttime job once, but I never, ever browsed the internet on company time even though all the "hard working" 100+ euro/hour consultants were checking the popular weblogs all day long. But then those consultants go on record as working so many hours and therefore people apparently think it is logical that they earn more money per hour than me, a lowly parttime employee.

The statistics include all the dirty, dangerous and manual jobs. The ones that are done predominantly by men and that campaigners forget about when they demand equality.

In US-parlance, all men are created equal.

We said that right off the bat. Once we decided that by men, we meant people, what further argument is there to have? All means all.

If you won't accept that case, then you're part of the problem that doesn't see it's the same issue over and over.

There are some inconsistencies but they've definitely managed to avoid most of them.

It's really quite shocking how many of those 'basic principles' are trampled on a daily basis. There should be a long term trend towards respect for those principles in the countries that are signatory to them, but in fact, on some fronts especially privacy the trend is backwards.

Examples include gays' right to marry, women's right to vote, slaves' right to freedom, etc.

From parents and close relatives it is easy to see a evolutionary reason. However from unrelated males (more common) it would seem that they would have every reason to encourage homosexuality in other males. Maybe it comes from when most people who lived together were related.

  From parents and close relatives it is easy to see a evolutionary reason

Surely a neo-darwinist sees the only goal of life as perpetuation of a specific genetic code. If an only off-spring chooses to take sexual partners that prevent the perpetuation of the parents genes beyond that offspring's generation then the parents genetic material will cease to be passed on. This is negative not because it is merely natural but because it destroys the only apparent purpose in such a system.

I can see how you'd argue against such a position but I can't see how you can see it is not rational.

- The exact same reasoning has been applied to why we commit altruistic acts by richard dawkins (sorry no reference). The general idea is that certain behaviours are somewhat hard-coded and applying them to everyone was a good enough approximation for helping your close relatives in the past.

- This is speculation. Generalisation is quite rational when speculating.

(Alternatively, perhaps JGC is very religious, and his religion guides his views on gay adoption and marriage.)

The notion that atheists are less moral than theists is a common misconception.

EDIT: Hacker News is not allowing me to reply to you, so I'll ask my question here: If a group of atheist people shared a set of contradictory beliefs, requiring vile and immoral actions, would that make atheism immoral?

It's essentially the same argument that Karma is a moral cop-out: you should be good for its own sake, not because the universe is keeping score will reward you in this life or the next.

A gay friend told me about the theory that homophobia is misogyny e.g. some people are homophobic because they don't like men acting like women (mannerisms, dress, voice pitch, sensitivity) because they dislike women.

Interestingly enough, I'm pretty sure my comment will shock more people than your comment--even though both comments posit some sort of handwavy unsubstantiated psychological theory nakedly constructed to fit some sort of political bias, yours sounds better because it fits the political bias most of us--myself included--agree with.

Or--to put it a more direct way--speculating about the psychology of people who disagree with you is an especially useless type of ad hominem.

We take a sample of subjects. They sit in a room. They are told that in the other room is another person that they will play a game against (actually the outcomes of the games they play are the same for everyone). At some point this involves giving electric shocks to this person. Before they start they are shown a movie of this other person. Now, part of the group gets a movie of a man acting normal and the other part is gets a movie of the same man acting gay. After this the subjects are tested for gayness. It turned out that there is a positive correlation between gayness and the severity of the electric shocks delivered to the gay acting guy. So the theory is that homophobes are (a little) gay themselves, and they are afraid that they act like the gay guy.

Edit: here it is http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=single-angr...

It turns out my memory didn't work flawlessly ;)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterosexism

Would we call a TV show with no minority characters "racist?" Maybe, but it might be seen as stretching the meaning of the word, and the question of whether or not the show was actually racist would be a question to debate, not a part of the definition. I suppose we could have terms for TV shows, movies, corporate boards, startups, etc. that lack minority, gay or other kinds of people. But using an "-ism" for such terms implies discrimination, which I believe should remain open for discussion and debate.

Though not in so many words, the kind of academic liberals who use words like "heterosexist" and "heteronormative" would.

See http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=single-angr...

The thought that a man might have such desire toward them terrifies them. Essentially, they're scared that a man might do to them (or want to do to them) what they want to be able to do to women.

Obviously, this is ridiculous and irrational-- there's no epidemic of gay men raping other men, and straight men are overwhelmingly more likely to be raped by otherwise straight men than by gays-- but I think that's what is behind this rather absurd fear some men have of homosexuality.

I guess I'm sadder that in the world I live in such a thing matters so much, than I was that bad things were done to Turing.

So jgrahamc: FWIW I just figured you were some guy who was more annoyed than me over the Turing thing, and better positioned to make a fuss over it, and for that: good on you. Were I asked, I would have assumed your sexuality is straight, but thats just playing the odds, as I don't know or care who you screw.

People wondered why he was sticking up for Turing in particular - a lot of people have been abused by the government (and society) in the past. They wondered if he had a certain interest in this specific case; and they falsely assumed it was an issue of sexuality, forgetting that Turing was a geek too :)

I was either ignored, or verbally abused, or physically assaulted. In one attack two boys pinned me down and asked me the incongruous question: “Do you prefer music or art?”. “Art” after all was something only a poof would like. ..."

Cripes @JGC I feel for you mate. The self description as a student could fit any reader here. There but for the grace go I - except I was probably bigger & uglier than yourself.

Anyone who wants a quick understanding of the mechanics of bullying and ways to circumvent it, take a peek at "Hacking People" ~ http://bootload.posterous.com/hacking-people and some thoughts on identifying Cyber Bullies ~ http://seldomlogical.com/2010/03/13/hacking-bullies

I'm wondering what the differences were. I know one is that I went to high school in a highly educated town where geeks and jocks were nearly equally respected. That can't be the whole story, however, because I also had some friends who happened to be the less socially able geeks, and I experienced a similar degree of friendship and acceptance in junior high, which was in a decidedly less intellectual-friendly city.

I'm sorry if I seem to be going on, but I want to provide a counterpoint to the picked-on geek, and I'm curious why the bullied geek is such a common stereotype (seems to be a true stereotype; I don't argue otherwise).

Extrovert? This matters because if you are introverted people see less information. Being in social situations might also give off a "discomfort" signal in body language. It's easy to see someone is uncomfortable. Harder to understand why? Reading body language is one way Bullies select targets.

Simple experiment. Next time someone is in an argument with you change your stance by placing your hands on your hips, "arms akimbo". The stand of defiance. It's no coincidence US Marine Corp instructors use this stand. It means don't mess with me, I'm standing my ground. Extroverts won't have a clue about these subtle body language because they have more interesting things to think about. Hence they can become TARGETS.

"... I know one is that I went to high school in a highly educated town where geeks and jocks were nearly equally respected. ..."

Now that's a good place to be. I'm not sure it's Geeks v's Jocks as much as Geeks being the bottom of the short lived social graph. PG refers to this phenomena in "Why Nerds are unpopular" ~ http://paulgraham.com/nerds.html

"... I want to provide a counterpoint to the picked-on geek, and I'm curious why the bullied geek is such a common stereotype (seems to be a true stereotype; I don't argue otherwise). ..."

Because they show weakness. Because they could be introverted and therefore appear weak. Because not enough people stand by them when it counts. These reasons alone make them a TARGET for bullies.

I think you mean "introverts", there.

Excellent stuff, go boxing. There's a lot to say for standing up for yourself.

"... But a great many of my friends were bullied, some horribly. I've never been able to understand the mechanics of it very well even after having seen it so many times. ..."

Observing body language should probably be a taught subject in school ~ http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/spycatcher/201004/what-e...

An understanding of body language might allow you to see peoples intentions before they give off overt intent. If you want to understand more about decoding & understanding behaviour, talk to http://twitter.com/navarrotells or get a copy "Louder than words" or "What Every Body is Saying" ~ http://jnforensics.com/Books_%26_Videos.html

One incident in middle school permanently ruined the reputation of a would-be bully since all he knew how to say to start a fight was "common man, let's go". To which I responded "okay, sounds great, where to?" He repeated his statement over and over while I repeated mine. Eventually, it defused the fight. I think he simply didn't know how to respond when I didn't back down and simply took what he was saying absolutely literally instead of as the slang he meant. It also happened in front of a crowd and all through middle and high school was ribbed as the guy who couldn't figure out where to go. He used to get a few compasses at the beginning of every year and offers to help him find his way to class.

However this technique does not always work. Bullying is about finding weakness and applying an asymmetric attack. I'm not sure this approach will work with say a group of girls?

There is a problem though with many subjects in that they are simply not physically capable to respond. I was lucky that my father taught me how to box and told me that he would stand up for me with the school administration if I ever got in a fight standing up to bullies at school. I knew, because of that, that if I was called out to a fight, I could show up at the designated time and place and give what I could. The only times I was every bullied was immediately after transferring between schools, and it only lasted the first time. However, most of my friends were not so lucky, they either didn't have the parental support, or were actively advised to keep their heads low and just suffer through. A few of them had physical problems that prevented them from getting into fights, etc. Some of my friends got hurt pretty bad as a result and were tormented throughout school.

I'm not a girl so I can't really say how to deal with girl bullying. Girl bullies seem to operate on a much subtler level than guy bullies, mostly through social ostracization campaigns. What always fascinated me is how girl bullying has almost no effect on a guy (even with other girls), so girls quickly give up on bullying guys (I'll come back to this in a second), but can devastate a girl, while the inverse, guys bullying girls can be just as effective as guys bullying guys.

It seems to me that getting a girl who is bullied out of the environment where she is bullied as much as possible, and into a group of peers where she can exist without that kind of mal-treatment (basically allow her to socialize in a safe way) can do wonders to build social skills. I have a niece who is smart, creative, talented and otherwise charming, but who is definitely not one of the popular girls. I happened to see her socializing with some of her friends in a public area when the "popular girls" came into the space. I noticed that her friends immediately withdrew while she more or less just ignored them. I think the difference is that her parents enroll her in all kinds of activities, so she has enough confidence through socialization to ignore being ignored, while her friends do no such extra-curricular activities and only know how to socialize with that particular group of peers.

The problem with girls also seems to be identifying bullying. Is she just getting ignored or is she getting bullied? With a guy, a torn shirt or bloody nose is easy to see. So I asked my niece, did she feel like those girls bullied her? Without hesitating she said "no, but they do bully my friends." And I think that the secret for her is what I said earlier about girl bullies and guys. Most guys just ignore girl bullies, and my niece seems to do the same. She has enough socialization with other kids her age who don't bully her that she feels confident enough to simply ignore the bullies and as a result she doesn't get bullied. She knows that she has a peer group she can draw positive socializations from, while her friends are still thinking that someday, those popular girls might want to be friends with them and care about maintaining that possible relationship -- which the popular girls seem to use as an avenue for their bullying.

Whenever someone would try to designate a time and place, my response was invariably, "No. Right now."

I thereby avoided the scenario where I won the fight in private but the challenger publicly claimed victory anyway.

It also cut down the number of challengers very quickly. I didn't have to fight at all in high school. :)

Somehow, I never thought of doing that at the time.

The other reason is to avoid an ambush.

Don't know about this. I've seen groups of women cut men down in bars all the time. Another explanation is maybe men don't show weakness.

"... She knows that she has a peer group she can draw positive socializations from, while her friends are still thinking that someday, those popular girls might want to be friends with them and care about maintaining that possible relationship -- which the popular girls seem to use as an avenue for their bullying. ..."

Excellent observation.

>I’m conflicted about whether gay couples should be allowed to adopt.

Why on earth shouldn't a gay couple be allowed to adopt?

In the US, it is legal in every state for single parents to adopt. However, in some states it is illegal for same-sex couples to adopt children.

For the real kicker, in Florida (where I am from), homosexual people cannot adopt. So while a single straight woman can adopt a child, a single lesbian woman cannot.

Malcolm Gladwell also examines the phenomenon of implicit social adjustment in his book _Blink_ (http://www.amazon.com/Blink-Power-Thinking-Without/dp/031601...).

I'm not up to date on the literature regarding child development. It may be that there are studies that suggest that homosexual families are no different than heterosexual families in terms of impact on the child. I'm just throwing this argument out there because it is one of the few non-homophobic arguments against homosexual adoption that I know of. I don't personally have an opinion on this issue because I'm not qualified.

No, we don't. We like to think we do. Consider: most Americans agree that a substantial number of prisoners suffer repeated rape and abuse. This is so commonly accepted that it is a well known trope in mass market entertainment. Prisoners obviously cannot defend themselves. Yet there is zero political pressure to reform the criminal justice system to alleviate this problem. Because we really don't care that much about protecting people who can't protect themselves.

More to the point, if we did place a high value on protecting children, then child protective services organizations would not be chronically underfunded and understaffed. In most places, CPS case workers are so overwhelmed by absurd case loads, that they cannot give sufficient attention to most of their cases, so children end up slipping through the cracks.

The fact that American protection of the defenseless isn't completely perfect doesn't mean we don't care about it as a society. You gave two examples and then extrapolated from your small sample to claim American society doesn't actually care about the disenfranchised. I think you might need some perspective.

I don't think this a reasonable way to analyse societal priorities. Obviously, all human societies are going to place some value on protecting the defenceless. I mean, can you think of any human society that placed no value whatsoever on protecting the defenceless? So if that's the metric you're going to judge on, then no society can ever fail. As a result, this strikes me as a pretty useless metric.

The original comment used the phrase "especially high value on protecting the rights of people who cannot defend themselves." The only reasonable way I know of to assess such statements is to compare America to peer nations that have similar levels of wealth and similar forms of government. I mean, "especially high" seems to require a relative comparison. Specifically, one might look at child poverty, child malnourishment, or infant morality. On any of those metrics, the US ranks dead last (or near dead last) when compared with peer nations. That result does not seem to be compatible with the notion that the richest country in the world has a greater concern for the welfare of defenceless children than other western nations. Don't you agree?

Look, you can point to my examples and claim that they're special cases, but human organizations demonstrate their values with their budgets. Talk is cheap. Paying for enough CPS staff is not. Well, actually, it is really cheap given the benefits. Underfunded CPS? American society doesn't care all that much about disadvantaged children. Or rather, American society values low marginal tax rates and absolute parental autonomy higher than providing for child protection services. That doesn't mean that American society is bad or evil or that Americans are monsters, but it does mean that you can't justify policies by talking about our unique commitment to protecting defenceless children.

There is also the question of what are considered good outcomes for children. For example, I read somewhere that children of gay parents have sex earlier or more often. Assuming that's true, is it a good or bad thing?

If there would be large numbers of cases proving that it essentially makes no difference then that would help, but you're in a chicken-and-the-egg situation.

I know of one gay couple in my circle of friends that would like to adopt a child and they've come to the conclusion that they themselves can't come to a 100% agreement between the two of them about what that responsibility exactly entails. It was a very eye opening discussion, because I think I went away a changed person, essentially form going to saying 'I don't see why not' to 'maybe it really is better, who knows'.

For me that's a weird thing because when I thought about this before I always thought that gay people would not 'overlap' with straight people on this issue but would be on the far side of a barrier that you can not cross because you can not imagine what it is exactly like to be gay when you are not.

This is a very complex issue, societal pressures are such that simply being raised as the child of two gay parents puts undue pressure on a child (for instance peer pressure), and that can cause serious damage. That's the sort of argument that they went on about and I had never even thought of it from that angle.

In another scenario, isn't it better for a gay child in foster care to be adopted by gay parents than by straight parents?

When you say "peer pressure", is that just a euphemism for bullying?

The situation I had in mind was two gay people without children adopting a child.

> In another scenario, isn't it better for a gay child in foster care to be adopted by gay parents than by straight parents?

That would probably be a good thing.

*or gestational mother in the case of a non-traditional surrogate

To present the argument again, because homosexual parenting hasn't been extensively studied, we need to avoid homosexual adoption until a foundation of research can be established in this area. Research on developmental psychology guides many of the child adoption rules currently in place. The argument is that the same standard should be applied to homosexual adoption.

Again, note my use of distancing language. This isn't my opinion; I do not hold one on this issue because I'm not qualified in this area.

EDIT: The American Psychological Association has filed an Amicus Brief that is relevant.

"Because many beliefs about lesbian and gay parents and their children are open to empirical testing, psychological research can evaluate their accuracy.... the results of existing research comparing lesbian and gay parents to heterosexual parents and children of lesbian and gay parents to children of heterosexual parents are quite clear: Common stereotypes are not supported by the data... Some areas of research, such as gender development, and some periods of life, such as adolescence, have been described by reviewers as understudied and deserving of greater attention... There is no evidence to suggest that lesbian women or gay men are unfit to be parents or that psychosocial development among children of lesbian women or gay men is compromised relative to that among offspring of heterosexual parents... although a considerable amount of information is available, additional research would further our understanding of lesbian and gay parents and their children... It should be acknowledged that research on lesbian and gay parents and their children, though no longer new, is still limited in extent. Although studies of gay fathers and their children have been conducted (Patterson, 2004), less is known about children of gay fathers than about children of lesbian mothers."

http://www.apa.org/pi/lgbt/resources/parenting.aspx

Personally, seems like a reasonable standard of proof to me, but I think the people who hold the argument I've been presenting would say that the standard of proof necessary is up to the courts. Clearly there are areas that need more research, as the research is "limited in extent".

I think there's a tendency for people to underestimate the exposure they get to their families as compared to the exposure they get to anyone else in the world when it comes to close emotional contact.

Some of use who are aware of having had emotionally withdrawn fathers (or mothers) realise this better than others.

+ Ignoring tragedies, of course.

Edit: footnote symbol caused formatting changes.

Additionally to this you could imagine a scenario where the genes that tended to increase heterosexuality also played a part in being a naturally 'good parent'.

Of course all these 'first assumptions' could and should be replaced by actual evidence and I know there is some of that. However I'd argue that studies and statistics to date are likely to be biased by the additional hurdles placed in front of gay couples. Only the very best and most dedicated gay couples are likely to allowed to adopt.

I'm not arguing that this justifies a blanket ban, but a degree of caution seems to make sense.

http://www.apa.org/pi/lgbt/resources/parenting.aspx

"Beliefs that lesbian and gay adults are not fit parents likewise have no empirical foundation."

> "Beliefs that lesbian and gay adults are not fit parents likewise have no empirical foundation."

As I argued in my post, most studies are likely to effected by selection bias so it is going to be tough to get a solid "empirical foundation" either way.

The real question is who should have the burden of evidence? Should we say that 'until gay couples are proven to be good parents we won't allow adoption' or 'unless it is proven that gay couples are bad parents they should have identical adoption rights'. I don't think either is sensible position and some sort of middle ground would be best as more evidence accumulates.

We shouldn't do either of those options, they are both total horseshit. It's not a matter of what rule we should adopt, it's a matter of should we adopt a rule at all. And no, we shouldn't.

Straight parents are the origin of the our species. Everyone of your biological ancestors forms a direct and unbroken line of 'Straight parents'. It is logical to assume children are well adapted to straight parents and vice versa. In fact we have no other real choice.

When a company develops a new substance and wants to use it as a food additive we naturally ask if it has been tested properly before allowing human consumption. But we do not ask whether commonly eaten foods such as rice and bananas need testing. The have been tested throughout history.

To put it another way,

However, with the number of children in care rather than with adoptive parents being quite massive I imagine the damage done by missing one gender of parent is significantly less than the damage done by living in such an institution.

• It's not hard to argue that it's good for a child to have a mom and a dad. I'm not going to get into such, but whether or not you agree, let's just accept that it's not a wild notion.

• Adoption is one of the few places where there's any chance for society to evaluate the fitness of parents before they can have children. Usually it just happens.

• A male-male couple (edit: or single male, or infertile female(s)) is the only combination that's forced into adoption, thus with the prior two points in mind, it's the only one where they are ipso facto subjected to societal evaluation, for a coupling that some consider less than perfect for children.

Now the reality is that most sets of parents are far from ideal. No doubt two loving gay parents is healthier than quarrelsome straight parents. But if quarrelsome parents are knocked up biology, not society sets the conditions.

The APA's official stance (one borne out by my personal experience with gay families) is that there is no difference in the well-being of children raised by two same-sex parents or two opposite-sex parents.

"...the results of existing research comparing lesbian and gay parents to heterosexual parents and children of lesbian and gay parents to children of heterosexual parents are quite clear: Common stereotypes are not supported by the data."

http://www.apa.org/pi/lgbt/resources/parenting.aspx

I wasn't answering with my belief, nor was I saying that gay parents are worse, but trying to get at where the root of apprehension might lie with liberal-minded folks, such as the case was in the article.

What I was trying to say is that such a belief is fairly prevalent and well short of nutjobbery.

I've had this debate before (strangely enough, at a faith-based LGBT family meeting with leaders of the Willow Creek megachurch in Chicago), and that particular point has been a sore sticking point. In its weak form (as you've presented) it does nothing to address the matter of LGBT parents, and in its strong form (gay parents are worse), it contradicts pretty much all available evidence.

The gender of the two parents didn't seem to have much of an impact.

That's probably more important - having both types of personality present?

Whenever I see gay couples on documentaries etc, there almost always seems to be one 'feminine' one, and one 'masculine' one. Regardless of what sex they actually are.

So no, you are not likely to find the "male"/"female" pattern among gay couples, but since it's not even common among straight couples, I strongly doubt it's relevant for raising children.

Most couples have pretty strongly defined roles. For example, if a shelf needs putting up, it's more than likely that the male will be tasked with this. If a daughter is after makeup advice, it's likely that they'll go to their mother rather than father.

Perhaps you're reading way more into what I'm saying than is actually there.

However, when it comes to gay relationships, you generally can't make any prediction about who does what or how the chores are divided. The notion that all relationships have (or worse: has to have) a "male" and a "female" is completely unfounded.

There are many reasons why someone can feel conflicted about something such as gay marriage and adopting but probably is linked most with upbringing and whether or not religion plays a factor. I'm guessing that he is personally conflicted rather than logically.

But from what I have heard adoption is a hard enough process without being gay.

Would you allow a pair of people who are not in a relationship to adopt, for example, two great friends who just happen to live together, but are not in a sexual or romantic relationship with each other?

I doubt if that is actually the case though.

But I think the 'stable family arrangement' factor weighs heavily in all this. And elsewhere in this thread I think I've shown that there can be pressure on a child simply because it is raised by two gay parents, after all, it immediately makes you the odd one out. Of course other children should be brought up to realize that it makes no difference as far as the child is concerned, but unfortunately that is not the case.

Teenagers that are gay as a rule do what they can to stay under water in plenty of cases for fear of the kind of nastiness that can come out of being 'out' at a young age. Not all schools deal with stuff like that well - in fact, most schools don't.

Long term stability is one of the very important aspects of the quality of parenting, but it's not all of them.

In fact long term stability is itself determined to some extent by the nature of the relationships between each parent and the child or children.

The point of my question was to help each person who wants to think about this issue clarify their ideas by asking themselves whether it's the nature of the relationship between the "parents" that's the issue, or whether it just matters that there is some sort of strong bond, whatever that may be.

I'm not trying to lead anyone to on conclusion or other, just point out a thought experiment that might help people understand their own points of view.

I am a person of mixed race, and I'm shocked at how many of the exact same arguments against gay marriage and adoption were also used against interracial marriage and interracial adoption. (It's unnatural; it's against God's will; it will harm the children; it will harm traditional marriages; it will destroy the institution of marriage...) I'm curious if the people making the arguments are aware of this and would also oppose interracial marriage if possible, or if they just don't see the parallels.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma

Are a truly random sample of children brought up by gay parents? I'd expect some large selection bias there.

We are not singling them out to allow adoption, unless by "singling out" you mean "including in the same privileged class as straight housewives, baristas, scientists, garbage collectors, members of the armed service, naturalists, and, depending on the state, convicted felons."

Seriously. Parents come in all shapes and sizes--surprisingly few restrictions are placed. Why are gay people barred from adopting when longitudinal studies show their parenting outcomes are basically indistinguishable from "normal" families?

- Division of child care and house routine - Ability to devote time to children - Self-reported satisfaction in childrearing relationships - Parenting awareness skills - What types of discipline techniques are used (i.e. reasoning vs. spanking) - Character of relationships with parents, peers, and other adults - Longitudinal studies of mental health factor (depression, acting out, ...)

Obviously, controls and sample distribution are complicated. You also need to separate the fact that more gay couples are adopting children from one partner's previous marriage which dissolved when they came out to themselves and/or their spouse. That can be stressful--but it can also bring a family together. I've heard stories from all over the map.

I'm a hacker, a Christian, and a gay man. I've been a babysitter and a church camp counselor (of children from fourth through twelfth grade).

Before you talk about the "problem gay men seem to have with sexual abuse," we should talk. A man's value is not defined by his sexual orientation.

Dude, I'm a hacker-herding atheist straight female, and that was beyond offensive to me too, so I figure between you and me we have all the bases covered :-)

First time I have hoped that somebody was trolling on HN though...

I also find his points are somewhat offensive. I say somewhat because I have learned that being offended by someones opinions (as opposed to him lashing out on you personally) is not a good thing. They are just that, opinions, ideas. Maybe thought inducing or maybe boring. Offensiveness alone, I think, should only ever be used held the offender when offensiveness was the purpose.

For that matter, why do you think scientists or armed service members are better candidates than baristi or garbage men? Late nights in the lab, relationship failure, and heavy drinking are a part of the science life. For that matter, lawyers have some of the highest alcoholism rates of any profession. Shall we conclude that they are unfit, as a class, to raise children?

(Disclaimer: I'm a gay physics major with a boyfriend in law school. I'd like kids some day.)

I... reluctantly conclude you are trolling. Strange, you don't see that often here.

Firstly it represents an important selection bias - most people would not want to promise to be celibate for the rest of their lives. Those who do do are likely to have 'outlier' sexual feeling and thoughts.

More obvious is that because they have no legitimate means to fulfil their sexual desires they are far more likely to find illegitimate means to do so.

A more sinister explanation is that they are attracted to the clergy because they are aware that it offers them the opportunity to commit abuse.

Nonetheless, it's a tenet of polite, modern society that slight demographic variations are not turned into generalizations over entire demographic groups.

Not allowing gay people to adopt because they're "more likely" to commit abuses is discrimination, whether or not you have the data to prove the logical statement.

Howver, a corollary of this tenet of modern society is that unequal representation in a given field/endeavor is prima facie evidence of discrimination, regardless of differences in group median ability. I trust I do not need to provide examples of this?

But just to make it crystal clear: you're not being down voted just because people are too polite to confront the truth. You're being down voted because you're not very smart.

Dude, you essentially made up or misinterpreted the numbers you're using[1], then you make what amounts to completely irrational sweeping generalizations based on nothing but two numbers and/or your (limited) social experience.. And, admit it, you know these conclusions are offensive. Not only that, but you can't even stand by your intentionally ambiguous statements about homosexual behavior after you post them -- you're not only an asshole, but completely gutless.

i.e. Shut the fuck up, kid. You have no idea what you're talking about.

Try the average husband. When the wife asks "does my butt look big in this", there's an immediate and well acknowledged convention to be polite rather than logical ;-)

You're basing your judgments on the flamboyant feminine gay men, the ones who you know are definitely gay. That's a very biased sampling to base your judgments on.

That's strange then because there are plenty of people here that have stated openly and without reservation that they are gay or transgender.

In a population of this size you should be very surprised if you are the only gay person.

Quite a few of them are 'out' in public, google can help you out there.

Is that a serious question? Who the hell wouldn't stand up for a man who was chemically castrated for being a homosexual. I mean, what reasonable non-crazy-fundie person would support that?

Wow, I kept reading:

"Many of those people who wrongly assumed I was gay would probably be surprised to learn that I campaigned for Alan Turing despite having my own discomfort with homosexuality. I don’t have clear thoughts about whether gay marriage or civil partnerships are better; I’m conflicted about whether gay couples should be allowed to adopt."

Seriously? This is worthy of being the top article on HN. Shudder. Not rhetoric I'm proud of in the least.

I have had my own stupid emotional discomforts. None of them were logical, but all of them were easier to deal with when I was open about it. Get off your high horse.

Edit: strike that "get off your high horse" bit, its too reactionary of me -- sorry about that.

It's that precise dichotomy and separation that we need to be moving away from, not framing entire blog posts about.

I don't see the article as a defense of JGC's sexuality in any way, but as a challenge to stand up for justice even of those who are different from us.

I'm really happy that he picked it up on principle. In a way, it's a lot more pure that someone _not_ gay spearheaded the effort so there is no appearance of a conflict of interest (rational or irrational). Turing was the man, and I'm glad Britain recognizes that now.

"That which can be destroyed by the truth should be."

Some people seem to be afraid of truth. I've noticed this when I've turned down cheese, and upon being asked why, saying I think it's unhealthy for me. Often they start saying why they can't live without cheese, or why eating cheese regularly doesn't increase the risk of disease unless you have a certain risk factor (like high blood pressure or a sedentary lifestyle). This happens without me doing anything except turn it down. I find people have an easier time accepting it if I act like I'm turning it down for moral reasons rather than nutritional reasons.

As for how truth-avoidance leads to this: I think that people don't want to accept a certain truth often don't want to accept justice that's based on that truth. In this case, the truth is that, even though he's gay, Turing deserves fairness just like everyone else.

† I got the quote from http://yudkowsky.net/rational/virtues and am surprised not to be able to find it on one of the major quote sites.

It seems as if this author had been living in Turing's time period his post would have read:

"I don't have clear thoughts about whether chemical castration or forced celibacy is better; I'm conflicted about whether gay couples should be allowed to be free."